Is the situation of "MSYS is CYGWIN" documented?

[smacdonald-kai]

Some time ago I became aware of the export MSYS=winsymlinks:nativestrict part of the [ symlinks on Windows ] situation, and added this to my $HOME/.bashrc as one does.

Recently I've helped figure out an issue ( #5303 ) which has a workaround of export MSYS=disable_pcon which I also want to add to my .bashrc. The question is, what is the format of the MSYS environment variable? Do I have multiple lines of settings? Is it a single line with values comma-delimited? I was unable to locate any documentation about it. :-(

So I took to looking at the source code, as one does. I found https://github.com/git-for-windows/msys2-runtime/blob/6abc3bb22b40096e4a61b02e260e6934d82539b9/winsup/cygwin/environ.cc#L204 which strongly implies that MSYS is just CYCGWIN ( https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using-cygwinenv.html ). Which means the answer to my question is "It's space-delimited".

Did I miss where this equivalence is documented?
If not, can it be added to the documentation somewhere? Even if it's just an FAQ entry?

[dscho]

As far as I know, this is not really documented. The closest is probably https://www.msys2.org/docs/symlinks/.

[smacdonald-kai]

Oh yeah. I had seen that page last week but somehow missed the "All these modes can also be enabled in MSYS2 by setting the MSYS environment variable instead of CYGWIN."

So it's at the MSYS2 level. I'll take my whinging over there. :-)

Thanks for your help!

Edit: Discussion at MSYS2: msys2/MSYS2-packages#6254